Developing Technological and Pedagogical Affordances to Support Collaborative Inquiry Science Processes

One key feature of scientific community is collaborative shared enquiry and problem solving mediated by electronic networks. We report on the development and evaluation of an ICT tool to support learning how to learn together (L2L2) in Science Education as part of an EC funded project called "Metafora" (FP7-ICT-2009.4.2/257872). Through literature review we isolated some key features of L2L2 and inquiry science processes. We turned these into icons within an ICT environment to support planning and reflection of inquiries stimulated by real-world challenges. In this paper we report the design-based research study carried out in secondary schools in Spain in order to gain understanding about the Metafora's technological and pedagogical affordances to support students' awareness of the key aspects of learning together and the key scientific inquiry processes. Our findings suggest that the ICT environment may help rise students' awareness of key collaborative scientific processes. These findings may contribute to the development of tools to support more web-mediated collaborative learning. (Contains 1 figure and 1 footnote.) [For the complete proceedings, see ED542606.]